Born on October 23, 1923, in Richmond, Indiana, Ned Rorem began his training in music at an early age. By the age of ten, his piano teacher introduced him to musical luminaries such as Debussy and Ravel. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, and in two years received a scholarship to The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He went on to study under the supervision of Bernard Wagenaar at The Juilliard School earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees in composition. Privately, he studied orchestration with Virgil Thomson while working as his copyist in New York. During the summers of 1946 and 1947 he continued his education through the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood as a student of Aaron Copland. He then traveled to Europe, where he resided from 1949 to 1958 in post-war Paris, and immersed himself in French culture. Upon returning to the United States, he held academic appointments at the University of Buffalo from 1959-1961; the University of Utah from 1965-1967; and maintained a guest faculty position for a period of years at Yale University. Since his appointment in 1980, he serves as Professor of Composition at The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. A recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize, he has composed music for every genre including the symphony, concerto, chamber music, keyboard music, choral music, opera, and art song. On September 12, 2003, I had the pleasure of interviewing him to discuss various aspects of his work and life experiences.
SB: When and why did you start composing for chorus?
NR: The first choral piece I wrote was at Juilliard. I wrote some madrigals on poems of Sappho. I learned the poems in a literature class taught at Juilliard. That was in 1946. No, earlier than that in 1943, I wrote a piece for William Strickland and the Army Music School at his request. It was on Psalm 70 for men's chorus and about four or five instruments.
SB: How did you choose those poems for the madrigals?
NR: Well, they were in a book of literature, and I was attracted to them. I choose poems according to what I need. Any composer of vocal music has his own taste.
SB: How would you describe your compositional process?
NR: Well, I'll tell you one thing--I never really talk about my own music--I talk about other people's music. I've written five books that contain about 150 essays, none of which is on my own music. I am not interested, really, in what composers say about their own music. I think the music speaks louder than they do. Occasionally, with a class I might analyze a piece, but usually it's a piece by somebody else. There are three ways to talk about music. First, the Women's Club way--the sentimental way, in other words. I was in love . . . and the moonlight . . . and I was sad . . . and somebody died . . . so I was inspired. But that's all nonsense. Everybody is inspired--but not everybody has the control to make inspiration speak to other people. The second way is the technical way--which you do with students. You talk about how a piece is made. But again, there's no one way of saying how a piece is made. There are as many ways as there are people talking. Third, is composers amongst themselves. They talk about, "how much money did you get," to provide a certain kind of piece. When a piece is not exclusively musical, then it's a setting of words. I've set easily 200 different authors to music and I'm a literary person myself. I think whatever my vocal music might be worth, at least the choice of text is pretty high class. That's as much as I can say about my own music.
SB: What do you think are some of the challenges composers in general face when writing for chorus?
NR: Well, you learn how to write music. The challenge is knowing what a chorus is--how high do they go, how low can they go, how good is this chorus as opposed to that chorus. I've written for huge choruses with orchestra. The Gay Men's Choruses, about ten or fifteen years ago, they, each one, commissioned a different composer. There were ten of them and they were all going to sing in New York. They commissioned me to write a piece for all ten. In others words, that was about 1000 male voices. I chose a Walt Whitman text and made eight or ten songs out of it with twelve brass. What I learned from that was a) brass can hold its own against 1000 voices very easily, and b) the effectiveness of 1000 voices--1000 voices is not ten times louder than 100--but it's ten times fuzzier. The most effective things were the very pianissimo sections. I've written for big chorus, and a regular mixed chorus, and orchestra, for Margaret Hillis and the Chicago Symphony, for example. Since I knew it is the best chorus in the world, I wrote, I did, whatever I wanted. I don't think many of my pieces are difficult, at least not difficult to hear, but they take real singers. The challenges, in other words, are generally theatrical as well as technical.
SB: What would you say are some of the trends you've seen in terms of writing for chorus during the 20th century?
NR: You have to be more specific. Ask me about specific pieces.
SB: How about comparing and contrasting Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Lukas Foss' The Prairie?
NR: Well, Symphony of Psalms is in Latin isn't it . . . and so is Oedipus Rex. When Stravinsky wrote Oedipus Rex, he said, "it's a Greek story but we'll put it in Latin." Since nobody knows how Latin is pronounced anyway he could do whatever he wanted. He thought almost strictly about music as distinct from vocal music. Although it's very singable, for the men's chorus, the very first three words are Oedipus pronounced in three different ways. Lukas Foss' Prairie on the other hand is of a young European coming to America and trying to be more American than the Pope. He took Carl Sandburg, I think, and took a very, very, very American song and made it as comprehensible as possible. Those were literary considerations rather than musical considerations, which is mostly what choral music is anyways. A composer either knows how to write or he does not. I don't know if you can talk about trends in choral music. On the whole, music goes generally from contrapuntal to--it doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse--but it goes from contrapuntal to harmonic and contrapuntal to harmonic. The harmonic periods are usually a lot more simple than the counterpoint. The Boulezes, and Elliot Carter, and all that, was contrapuntal. That emerged into the extremely diatonic period that we're in now and came out of a diatonic period in France which came out of Wagner, which was very contrapuntal. I think you could name big choral pieces of the past many years by Americans on the fingers of one hand. In England, there are more--and that has to do with the Church in England. I've written, I think, as much choral music as any other American and easily half of that is on so-called "sacred" text; much of it with organ and much of it simple enough for a congregation to sing, or at least for a good church choir to sing. I've written hours worth of that for various reasons. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in belief. I respect it and I think a lot of great literature--a lot of lousy literature has been done in the name of the Lord--but so has lot of great literature and great painting. Though I may not believe in the Lord, I do believe in Psalms to the Lord. So many of my texts have been given to me by churches that have commissioned me to write motets and introits. But, for bigger works, I've chosen my own lay texts.
SB: What composers have influenced you?
NR: I don't talk about that. We're all influenced. I'm French and not German. No German composer has ever influenced me at all. All of the music I like is French. I think the whole universe is divided between those two aesthetics--French and German. If that's true, I'm definitely French. It's not for a composer to say that he's been influenced by this or that person. Usually, if he's conscious of it, he tries to hide it. The very act of hiding is what, if he has anything to say, he translates what he has stolen into his own language. Therefore it's for you to say but not for me. To say that, Ned is influenced by Poulenc or Ravel, Debussy and so forth, but certainly not Boulez and that French group, which is essentially German.
SB: In terms of your contemporary composers, do you feel anyone deserves more attention or less attention?
NR: I think I should get more attention. I think Philip Glass should get less attention. I think that the world as we know it, culturally, is getting more and more vulgar--more and more dumbed down. We are the only period in history ever that emphasizes the past at the expense of the present. We are the only one that emphasizes performers at the expense of the composer. The performer of serious classical music who plays mainly Beethoven makes in one night what I make in a year. Even those people with their Beethoven, Brahms--it's almost never French--and Bach, are only one percent of music today--which is generally rock and pop music. Even cultured intellectuals don't know much about "serious" music, for lack of a better term. This is getting worse rather better. I give us another ten years before I think the whole world's going to blow up.
SB: That leads into another question I have. You have spent a significant amount of time teaching at universities. What are some of your thoughts about all the composers and performers we're training now? What do you think the future is going to be like for them?
NR: Well, I don't know, but there have always been about 10,000 people in the world who give a damn. It's always been that way no matter how big the population in the world is, but it's an ever-shrinking minority. On the other hand, at Curtis where I teach, although I'm going to stop at the end of this year, and at Yale where I was and other places, there are people who really care. The thing is, in the whole world there is no teaching of music in grade school and high school any longer in appreciation for the arts. Everything is money. Some of the young composers are never going to make money anyway, distinct from young investment brokers. They shouldn't be in it for the money, they should be in it for the love of it. There's always an outlet. I don't know why a piece has to have an audience of 20,000. A string quartet, if it's played in front of 100 people, what's the matter with that in a hall that seats one hundred. The future will be always aristocratic I suppose, or specialized. I think the future of the world is getting dreary. I think we're going to blow ourselves up, but there are always caring people--at least that you and I are interested in. I do think we could re-encourage the teaching of music appreciation courses as they used to be called, but nobody really can do that, or will do that much anymore.
SB: I know you are also a prolific author. Would you say your writings influence your compositions at all?
NR: No, the two things fulfill completely different needs. I'm a composer who also writes as distinct from a writer who also composes. What I encouraged to get published was the diaries as I was in my forties and already had a reputation as a composer for twenty years. I don't set my own words to music because, as I said before, I think my taste of words to be set to music is pretty high-class. If I were good enough to write my own words for music, I wouldn't need to write music because the words would be sufficient of themselves. I think there's something incredibly self-important about setting my own words to music. The kind of words I write are definitely prose. It's not poetic writing, it's not mellifluous, and it's not vague. I like to get ideas across. My prose has to do with ideas, which a literary writer would write. The two careers are independent of each other.
SB: Is there anything else you would like to share with the general readership of this article?
NR: I think churches have been and are usually very encouraging about contemporary organ music. I've written a great deal of organ music and I don't even particularly like the organ. My late friend, Jim Holmes, was an organist and I wrote a great deal of it for him and for other commissions. I wish that the readers could be encouraged to play more and more contemporary music and not just the same standard 19th century literature--because that's what will keep us alive.
